NAEP’S HIDDEN POWER - Understanding Achievement at the Intersections

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Kyle

NAEP’S HIDDEN POWER explains how the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) enable education leaders to move beyond broad demographic comparisons. It highlights intersectional, disaggregated analysis across characteristics such as socioeconomic status, gender, language background, and disability status to uncover hidden patterns. The text argues NAEP provides methodologically rigorous, consistent national evidence and supports smarter policy and investment decisions, including comparisons within and across major urban districts through TUDA.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages16

Reading Time40 min

AccessFree to download

The Power of Intersectional Data Using NAEP

Why intersectional insights matter

NAEP’s national role and coverage

TUDA’s expansion in urban districts

NAEP’S HIDDEN POWER: Understanding Achievement at the Intersections Akisha Osei Sarfo, Ph. D. Chester Holland, Ph. D. Michael Casserly, Ph. D. Brian Garcia Raymond Hart, Ph. D. 1331 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Suite 1100N Washington, DC 20004 tel: 202-393-2427 fax: 202-393-2400 [www.cgcs.org](www.cgcs.org) As America’s classrooms grow more diverse and educational challenges more complex, our examination and understanding of student learning must evolve. It’s no longer enough to look at descriptive measures of performance within broad demographic categories. If real progress is desired, we need to dig deeper. That’s why the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) program are more vital than ever. NAEP is the only national assessment that allows us to examine what students know and how they are performing at the intersections—not just by race or income, but by combinations of characteristics like socioeconomic status, gender, language background, and disability status. These layered insights allow us to better understand what’s working, where gaps exist, and how different groups of students may be experiencing school. In this post-pandemic time, when education leaders are under pressure to deliver results for all students, NAEP remains an indispensable source of truth. No other national assessment offers a methodologically rigorous and consistent measure of student performance across states and large urban districts, while also allowing for the analysis of over 100 student groups. The only national common measure of student performance, NAEP helps us drill down on oversimplified narratives of student performance across large student groups and focus on stories hiding in the data. It’s clear, now more than ever, that developing smarter policies, being more intentional and effective with investments, and improving student outcomes requires protecting and enhancing the use of this tool. NAEP's Hidden Power: Understanding Achievement at the Intersections | 1 THE POWER OF INTERSECTIONAL DATA USING NAEP Addressing disparities in student achievement requires going beyond aggregate-level comparisons to analyzedisaggregated intersections of data that capture the diverse experiences of students in our nation’s schools. Average, aggregate scores of main student group performance while helpful, can obscure or even mask important variations in student performance, while disaggregated and intersectional data can uncover hidden trends, reveal unexpected progress, and guide interventions and investments more precisely. This is important to understand, especially for urban schools, which often come under scrutiny and are unfairly judged for not meeting or exceeding national benchmarks. A deeper examination of specific student group performance often tells a different, more encouraging, story of growth, achievement, and progress. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the only nationally representative assessment in the United States that allows researchers and education leaders to compare student performance across narrowly defined student groups, including groups with intersecting identities. In education, intersectional data analysis (the ability to disaggregate data across multiple dimensions of student identity) has increasingly been embraced by educators and researchers to better understand nuanced achievement patterns and inform more effective, equity-focused policies (Castillo, W. & Gillborn, D., 2022; Evans-Winters, 2021; López, Erwin, Binder & Chavez, 2018; Schudde, 2018) . By moving beyond broad demographic categories, intersectional analysis provides a more precise understanding of student performance, and when tracked over time, can reveal persistent gaps in investments, allowing educators to direct resources and policy decisions more strategically. NAEP offers robust cross-sectional data and enables benchmarking across a generally

FAQs

What does NAEP uniquely enable education leaders to analyze?

NAEP is the only national assessment that examines what students know and how they perform at the intersections of multiple characteristics, not just race or income.

How do intersectional, disaggregated data improve understanding of achievement?

By moving beyond aggregate scores, intersectional analysis uncovers hidden trends, reveals unexpected progress, and helps guide interventions and investments more precisely.

How does the TUDA program extend NAEP’s usefulness for urban districts?

TUDA enables comparisons within and across major urban districts, with participating districts receiving district-specific scores through oversampling.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Kyle